How do you get employees who have been with an organization for a very long time to think outside the box? To be willing to even consider doing things differently? That was my major dilemma as a consultant to Elizabeth (this and all other names are pseudonyms), the new Chief Executive Officer of a nonprofit organization—one that had provided intervention, counseling, and case management services to low-income families with incarcerated loved ones for many years. At the time of my engagement, many of the staff had been with the organization a long time—37 percent more than ten years, 26 percent more than twenty. A number of those currently in leadership positions began as entry-level employees.
Because Elizabeth came in on the heels of a charismatic leader, she experienced a constant push/pull: to move the agency forward while respecting the accomplishments of past leadership. I found the culture of the organization to be risk-averse, one in which mistakes were usually seen as negatives rather than as learning opportunities. Being asked to consider innovation or out-of-the-box thinking meant exercising new muscles for many of the staff and board members.
Too often, things were done the way they were simply because they’d always been done that way. People limited their contributions to the narrow scope to which they were assigned. I saw the potential for a more vibrant, proactive, and coherent agency culture and began seeking opportunities to capitalize on this potential richness.
The twenty-plus staff were uniformly focused on the wellbeing of the families they served. Program supervisors and many of the frontline staff held licenses in social services-related fields and had a wealth of knowledge about the effects of incarceration, abuse, neglect, poverty, and drug exposure on children and families.
During my first few weeks as a consultant, I spent much of my time in conversation with Elizabeth and these staff members, asking questions and listening closely to their answers. I wanted to understand the relationship dynamics, the history behind certain processes and decisions, and their expectations of leadership. My focus was on how to improve communication, especially among leadership team members. A constant refrain was encouragement to consider new ways of doing things.
As I learned more about the staff and their respective backgrounds and skills, Elizabeth shared with me that she saw a need for some personnel changes. There were mismatches in people and positions. Gerome and Evelyne, for example, both started as entry-level employees nearly thirty years ago. Now on the leadership team, each had held numerous positions within the organization, willing to fill in where needed even if their skills were not directly applicable to the position.
Gerome was serving as Director of Training, even though he’d had no previous training and development experience. He admitted that he often had to scramble to get himself up to speed in areas where staff needed continuing education. And there were some areas—counseling services, for instance—where he simply didn’t have the background or expertise to search for or evaluate the needed training. What Gerome did have were organizational skills. He was a quick learner, able to juggle many balls simultaneously, and good at tracking outcomes. I thought to myself, These are skills that would be extremely useful as Coordinator of Family Services.
Evelyne was the current Coordinator of Family Services. A qualified therapist, she had recently acquired training and certification as a performance coach—on her own dime. In a conversation with her, I learned she was already using what she’d learned to work one-on-one with the therapists to help them improve the effectiveness of their family counseling. It seemed to me that her background in counseling and her newly acquired skills as a performance coach would bring a new perspective to the training and development needs of the staff. In our conversation, Evelyne had expressed interest in the Director of Training position if it ever became open.
Switching her role with Gerome’s seemed a better use of their respective strengths and skills, and since I already knew of Evelyne’s interest, I encouraged Elizabeth to approach Gerome with the idea. He wasn’t particularly receptive. He thought she was criticizing his performance as training director. Plus, having been moved into different roles several times in the past few years, he was somewhat reluctant to take on yet another new position.
Elizabeth and I had a detailed conversation about how to frame this new opportunity. I advised Elizabeth to first reassure him that the contemplated move was not a criticism of his performance and stress instead how the new role played into his strengths. She could then explain why she felt it important to reorganize Family Services. I emphasized how his skills could really help shift the unit from its present reactive mode to one providing more planned intervention and skill building. This approach worked. By the end of their meeting, Gerome had agreed to assume the role of Coordinator of Family Services.
These personnel changes alone were not that unusual, but the way in which I advised Elizabeth to announce them was. Determined to be as transparent as possible, I helped her draft a lengthy email to the leadership team, telling them of the changes and why she’d made them. She asked for their feedback, wanting to get their thoughts before sharing the news with the rest of the staff. Several team members responded with helpful, constructive feedback. In the past, these changes were either not announced at all, or announced with no context or explanation. In my experience, simply reporting personnel or other changes without sharing additional information invites conjecture. The organization was already rife with distrust, gossip, and rumors, and my goal was for Elizabeth to head those off by being upfront about the changes she’d made.
The timing was such that Elizabeth included the announcement of personnel changes in her first board report. In preparation for this larger submission, she asked for individual reports from each member of the leadership team. In contrast to past procedure, she added her document to theirs and distributed the collection to everyone, not just the board. Historically, board reports had been marked “confidential” and were never shared with the staff, leaving a sense of secrecy and mystery. Our goal was to increase transparency, bring greater understanding of the agency as a whole, and gain increased buy-in from the board and the leadership team.
Feeling somewhat vulnerable by the knowledge that everyone in the organization would read the new CEO’s report, we’d written and rewritten it, and I suggested that Elizabeth ask a trusted colleague familiar with the organization for feedback.
This colleague’s reaction was, “Wow! You’re just gonna jump right in and put it all out there, aren’t you?”
“Why do you say that?” Elizabeth asked.
“I’m just surprised you’re talking so openly about the staff changes you’ve made,” she replied.
“I’m not criticizing at all,” her colleague clarified. “I appreciate your taking the risk. It just seems like a big break from the past practice of not talking about personnel changes openly.”
“I’m thinking of the comments we got on the recent staff survey,” Elizabeth explained, “about how we need to be more transparent and willing to talk openly about leadership actions. That’s what I’m trying to do.”
Taking a deep breath, Elizabeth submitted the entire package to the board and the leadership team . . . giving the managers permission to share it with their staffs. While we felt this would reduce rumors and conjecture, she was still nervous about possible negative reactions to her new openness in sharing information.
For days, Elizabeth incessantly checked her e-mail wondering what kind of reaction she’d get. She also talked to her husband and another colleague about it. They reassured her she was doing the right thing—what she believed in.
After receiving the report, full of details, several board members emailed or phoned to say, “Wow! This is really long.” (It was 64 pages.)
Her reply: “I warned you when I sent it to you to put on your reading glasses and get a cup of coffee.”
The staff members, for their part, were shocked to receive the document, but in a positive way. They had never been privy to the information before.
This experience encouraged Elizabeth to suggest that the board invite all full-time staff to the next board meeting—everyone, not just the managers. The board agreed, and nearly thirty people entered the virtual room. Everyone contributed, talking about their roles in the organization.
Afterward, some of the board members’ responses were:
“We’ve never done this before.”
“I didn’t even know this person existed. We would just get a report and that was it.”
“It was wonderful to see so many staff on the call. This was the best part of the meeting, in my opinion, and we should do this every time.”
They haven’t done it every time since then, but in this instance, board members seemed to appreciate the additional information the staff provided, and it made staff members feel important, that what they did mattered. The staff also liked learning about what everyone else was doing. We were surprised how little people knew about what others were engaged in. There is now regularly an open forum at the beginning of most board meetings, during which staff members may be invited to share some information, but they do not stay for the entire board meeting.
A few months later, Elizabeth asked for my help in developing a strategic planning process. The Strategic Planning Committee was a small group—Elizabeth and a few members of the leadership team and board. Its task was not to develop the strategic plan itself (which was how it had worked in the past), but to move the planning process along.
I encouraged Elizabeth to open the deliberations by involving more of the staff. We designed and conducted another survey of the entire staff and talked to follow-up focus groups.
The chair of the Strategic Planning Committee, a longtime board member, commented on the process: “For all this time, for better or worse, the process has been upside down. We’ve been fed the strategy by leadership; no staff were involved. Having staff participate in both the survey and the focus groups is completely new.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth agreed, “and the results have been eye-opening. We’ve learned a lot. Now I want to continue the leadership team’s involvement so they can begin to think strategically, see the bigger picture. I believe all members of the leadership team need to be at the board retreat where the strategic plan will be finalized.”
He nodded supportively as she continued, “We need them to provide context, to let the board know what’s already being done. They’re the ones who will implement the plan, so they deserve a say in it. But it’s going to be new to them. It’s not something they’ve ever participated in before. Some people who have been here thirty years have never been asked what they think the organization’s goals should be.”
Later, when the Strategic Planning Committee Chair explained this to the rest of the board, I heard him say, “All the managers need to be there, not just the original three we had planned to invite. Elizabeth needs them there. And we need their buy-in—by helping set our strategic goals, they will be accepting responsibility for meeting them.”
With the strategic plan in place and some key staff moves, Elizabeth could now focus on another important decision, hiring a Chief Operating Officer to share the top leadership load. She was able to find and hire Sara, who had the operations, staff coaching, and leadership experience the position required. She was also someone Elizabeth had known professionally for about ten years, had often used as a sounding board, and trusted completely.
Sara and Elizabeth began their work together by examining the programs making up the organization and the structure supporting them. One of their conclusions was that programming seemed to have grown over time by responding to individual requests for help and then creating services to meet those needs. As a result, they reacted to personal and family crises, but didn’t always help their clients build the skills necessary to prevent future problems, address the root problems of ongoing struggles, or develop self-sufficiency. This may have made sense in the beginning, but as the organization matured there was a need for more intentional program planning.
More forward-looking interventions might include performing regular assessments, creating a Plan of Service, or referring parents to programs that provided needed skills—such as forgiveness and reconciliation, job training, financial literacy education, or GED preparation. Some of these interventions were being made, but the processes were not formalized or systemic across programs.
At my urging, Elizabeth and Sara identified a core group of leaders within the organization—some directly involved in providing intervention services, others more peripherally affected by them—and asked them to join a planning group. The intent was to include a diversity of viewpoints and to be sure everyone was aware of how a change in one organizational area affected others.
They pulled in individuals from departments with no daily interaction with intervention—such as development, those responsible for telling their story to funders. Outreach needed to be involved as well, since they were the ones most likely to be aware of external resources and services that others could utilize in the intervention program.
Not everyone was enthusiastic about being part of this planning group. There was some resistance. Cross-functional meetings to discuss issues like this had been held a few years back, but with the change in leadership, the COVID lockdown, and the normal frenetic pace of a social service agency, the team was rusty. It was hard for some staff to see the value in coming together just to talk.
“Why are we wasting our time discussing these issues?” asked one director. “In my opinion, we’re not having any problems. We’ve had them in the past, but they’ve been solved.”
“Unfortunately,” Elizabeth replied, “solutions to our problems have often been arrived at by just a few people, without input from the larger team. As a result, some crucial facts were missed, and the so-called ‘solutions’ weren’t always effective. Decision-makers didn’t always have the data needed to make fully informed decisions and recommendations.”
Sara facilitated the first meeting, beginning with a request that they all take a step back to ensure that everyone was on the same page with what they were trying to achieve and what outcomes they wanted for their clients. She and Elizabeth felt they needed to go back to ground zero, interrogate what they were doing, and redefine what it was they aimed to accomplish. They wanted their new structure, staffing, and directional shift to be long-lasting.
The group began by discussing what they were currently doing. Elizabeth argued that the program had become a series of transactions, where they were responding to the immediate needs of clients without investigating what it would take for them to build long-term self-sufficiency.
“To illustrate what Elizabeth is saying,” Sara said to the group, “instead of paying to restore utilities shut off due to long-term nonpayment, why not work with a family to help them plan ahead and have them call us when they first encounter financial difficulty? Could we help them determine where their shortfalls are, and ask them to think about how they could make sustainable changes so they would be better able to meet their own needs?”
Elizabeth and Sara both firmly believed they needed to change from a reactive mode to a more structured and empowering one. This was not an easy sell to staff who had longstanding, personal connections with some of the families served.
Maggie was the first to speak up in defense of the status quo. “I’m afraid if we change the way we provide services, the clients won’t feel taken care of. They might feel we’re blaming them for being poor.”
“But where do we draw the line?” asked Gerome. “We can’t be all things to all people, and I’m not sure we’ve done a very good job of defining the boundaries.”
Evelyne jumped in. “I’m wondering, too, whether we’re doing the clients a disservice by making them dependent on us for help. Shouldn’t we try to provide them with the tools they need to really succeed, both short- and long-term?”
“But our families do depend on us,” Maggie said forcefully. “We can’t just pull the rug out from under them!”
“Maybe it would help if we developed a purpose statement,” Elizabeth suggested. “What is it we’re really trying to do? What does intervention mean to us? What does success in achieving our purpose mean to families? What does it look like?”
As team members continued to toss out ideas, it became clear that before they could agree on purpose, they needed to agree on some definitions.
For example, Meredith asked, “How do we decide who makes up the families we serve? Does it include extended family members?”
Tyler asked, “Should there be limits to how long we provide services to a family after their loved one is released?”
“These are all great questions,” Sara said with a smile. “It’s important that we wrestle with what it really means to be there for our families, while encouraging self-sufficiency.”
Finally, after two-and-a-half hours of active discussion, during which Elizabeth and Sara encouraged the participants to test their assumptions and ask questions designed to understand each other’s perspectives, they agreed on a purpose statement: Families who have experienced the trauma of incarceration can thrive when parents have the skills, support, and resources needed to navigate the complexities of daily life.
This purpose statement appears to be simple enough. Creating it did indeed seem like an easy task when they began, but the process was not linear. There were many twists and turns, and it took a second meeting to reach agreement on all the underlying definitions.
Ultimately, however, it was a great process, one they plan to duplicate in future discussions and planning efforts. They still have a long way to go to clarify where they want to be and agree on how to get there, but the process is now in place to have the kind of open and free-flowing discussion required.
The decision to focus on skill building and not merely distribution of goods and services was a major one. Yes, people will continue to need to visit their little food pantry, parents will need assistance paying the occasional utility bill, children will need Christmas presents and back-to-school supplies. They are still going to do all that. But their primary goal in the future will be to skill build, to address the underlying reasons why these supports are needed.
It was exciting and humbling to help open dialogue within this organization. People are beginning to understand they really do have a voice, and it matters. To further encourage the development of the leadership team, I suggested that Elizabeth enroll all of them in Dr. Latting’s online course, ChangeMakers, teaching the principles and skills of Conscious Change.
Melissa Simon received a Master of Social Work from the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work after working for several years with at-risk youth and their families involved in the criminal justice system. Her career trajectory took her into nonprofit fund-development and management, always in social-service agencies focused on at-risk populations.
She credits Dr. Latting with inspiring her passion for leadership both in courses taught at the Graduate College of Social Work and as Jean’s graduate assistant. Melissa spends much of her free time with her family, including her four children and six grandchildren, and friends.
